Tata Motors, in the not too distant future, will go from its current six platforms to just two. Done to give the company greater economy of scale, both these new platforms will be modular in nature and adaptable enough to build cars and SUVs of different shapes and sizes.

The first of these is called AMP (Advanced Modular Platform). Similar in concept to VW’s MQB, it is made up of 15 individual modules that can be put together to form a complete car. The size is variable too. The floor pan, for example, can be scaled for length, width, track and wheelbase (track and wheelbase each variable by more than 100mm). The first car off this next-generation platform is likely to be in showrooms by 2018 and Tata CEO Guenter Butschek says there are likely to be up to eight individual models produced on this platform.

The list of models includes hatchbacks, sedans, people movers and SUVs. Tata says commonality between the parts will be extremely high - as high as 80 percent - and that key modules like the front and rear axles, powertrains, HVAC modules, etc will contribute to 70 percent of the vehicle cost. Like VW’s MQB, the distance from the firewall to the front-wheel axis will be the only portion that is fixed, and the platform will be able to accept both three-and four-cylinder engines. There will be manual and automatic gearboxes available and the new platform will consist of a flat floor for maximum legroom in the rear.

Tata also claims the weight of the new platform is down a huge 170kg from the current one and this is likely to impact both performance and efficiency. In addition, provision has also been made for hybrid powertrains in future.

The second platform in the portfolio will be based on Land Rover’s L550, the one that currently underpins the Discovery Sport. This larger platform is likely to spawn higher-end vehicles, like the Q501 recently caught testing, and will include larger SUVs and soft-roaders. It is likely to come with the option of four-wheel drive, independent rear suspension and other more sophisticated features like radar-based cruise control.

While Tata insiders say there will be no new body-on-frame platform for now, Tata’s frame- based architecture, seen on the Hexa and updated Safari, is relatively new and, if required, the company will explore synergies with its Commercial Vehicle portfolio which will still use this ‘load-bearing’ architecture in the future .

One thing's for sure though, with AMP, Tata Motors will join an illustrious list of global manufacturers that are now adopting similar modular architectures like VW Group’s (MQB), Toyota (TNGA), etc. What remains to be seen is how effectively Tata can exploit this new platform.

This behemoth race truck will be showcased at the T1 PRIMA TRUCK RACING CHAMPIONSHIP this weekend

Most powerful truck ‘Built in India’

Power of 1000 bhp, with an acceleration of 0-160 km/hour within 10 seconds

Similar to global race trucks that compete in the UK and Europe, under FIA

Entering season 4 of the T1 PRIMA TRUCK Racing Championship and in keeping true to its commitment of introducing first-of-its-kind initiatives as leaders in the Indian commercial vehicles space, Tata Motors will showcase an all-new powerful 1000 bhp T1 PRIMA race truck in Season 4 of the championship.

With over double the power in comparison to the T1 race trucks competing in season 4, the all-new 1000 bhp T1 PRIMA race truck will further add exciting dimensions of speed and character to T1. Similar to race trucks that compete under the broad umbrella of the FIA in the United Kingdom and Europe, the all-new 1000 bhp T1 race truck is a perfect example of the capability and flexibility of Tata Motors next-generation World Truck, the Tata PRIMA.

The engine of the all-new 1000 bhp T1 race truck is being developed in collaboration with Cummins Inc. of the U.S., a world leader in diesel engines, enabling Tata Motors to not only set new benchmarks in T1 and the sport of truck racing, but in the Indian commercial vehicles space. The new T1 race truck is the most powerful truck built in India by far.

Developed to deliver unmatched power and acceleration of 0-160 km/hour within 10 seconds and a torque of 3500 Nm @ 1600 – 2200 rpm, the new T1 race truck is based on a 12 litre ISGe Cummins engine, mounted in the center of the chassis for equal weight distribution, with enhanced fuel delivery and air flow, producing 1040 HP @ 2600 rpm. The power is managed by an all-new ZF 16-speed gear box, making it fastest race truck developed by Tata Motors. With high performance rotating parts made of special materials, the engine is meant to withstand high temperature & pressure that a race truck is subject to on a race track.

Speaking at the occasion, Mr. Ravindra Pisharody, Executive Director – Commercial Vehicles, Tata Motors, said, “After having hosted three successive T1 seasons, we at Tata Motors are happy to announce our next big innovation in the form of the 1000 bhp T1 PRIMA race truck. Built with specifications similar to that of trucks that race globally, the vehicle was developed in a record time 12 months – a demonstration of teamwork, speed and capability. With this new track based machine, we are truly ahead of contemporary; we are FUTURE READY and through T1 we’ve proved time and again to showcase a distinctive partnership between sporting and technological excellence for the Tata Motors brand.”

In India, Tata Motors and Cummins Inc., USA, have a joint venture company called Tata Cummins Pvt. Ltd., established in 1994, developing high performance, reliable and durable engines in the range of 75 to 400 HP, that not only comply with current and future emission norms, but are also serviceable globally. The company has its state-of-the-art facility in Jamshedpur, aligning itself with the world-class manufacturing standards, consistently exceeded customer expectations.
Season 4 will also see accomplished racers from FIA’s European Truck Racing Championship (ETRC) competing in the championship for the very first time.

The ETRC will be represented by six racers from the rest of Europe, who will compete in the PRO CLASS category alongside six British drivers from the British Truck Racing Association (BTRA), who have raced in T1 since the sport was first introduced in 2014. Among these are Spanish Antonio Albacete, three time ETRC Champion (2005, 2006 & 2010), Hungarian Nobert Kiss, two time ETRC Champion (2014 & 2015) and T1’s first woman driver Stephanie Halm.

In Season 4, Tata Motors has also partnered with some of the country’s leading automotive brands. These are WABCO – Official Braking Technology Partner, JK Tyre – Official Tyre Partner, Castrol – Official Lubricant Partner, Cummins – Official Engine Technology Partner and Tata Technologies – Official Technology Partner.

India’s only truck racing championship is organised by Madras Motor Sports Club (MMSC), with safety and performance standards as per the guidelines of the British Truck Racing Association (BTRA). Conducted under the aegis of FIA & FMSCI, the T1 Prima Truck Racing Championship will feature Tata PRIMA race trucks, built for the purpose. A one-make championship, six teams will compete in the PRO CLASS CATEGORY of the T1 PRIMA Truck Racing Championship.

Season 4 of the T1 PRIMA Truck Racing Championship will be held on Sunday, March 19, 2017, at the Buddh International Circuit (BIC), Greater Noida.

Another thing i dont like about TATA strategy is that they have altogether junked the more than 4 meter length category by stopping MANZA

now all thier models are in Sub 4 meter lenght category excpet for SUVs like sumo aria which dont sell all that much

Click to expand...

Well, we do know that that the success of any Car Maker in the entry and mid market is by volume and NOT by value ie its the no. of sales.

One has to see the market for standard sedan vs sub 4 meters. It is ONLY to India that we see that the sales for Sub 4 meter is higher than the other. Heck the No. of models that are been introduce to this sub market is growing too

So the strategy for TATA to increase its low sales in the overall market , introducing Sub 4 meters Zest and now the Tigor ... is Sound!...im sure once the bottom line is good , they will introduce a standard sedan .

When an exclusive new two-seat sports car is built entirely for driving pleasure, with radical styling, butterfly doors, a carbonfibre backbone chassis, race-bred doublewishbone suspension and a highly tuned, mid-mounted engine, you can bet your mortgage it will turn out to be very large and very expensive.

This is the immutable law of the supercar, established over decades, and you’ll search in vain for anything European that breaks it. However, a brand-new midengined sports car from India’s biggest car maker, Tata Motors, kicks the established rules into touch. It is cheap to buy but exclusive. It is cheap to build but sophisticated. It is imposing and spacious inside but shorter than a Mini. Called the Tamo Racemo, it was revealed to great acclaim at the Geneva motor show in March.

But as Tata officials have made clear from the outset, there is much more to the Racemo’s appearance than the mere debut of an appealing driver’s car. The Racemo is the first product of an all-new Tata sub-brand called Tamo (the short form of ‘Tata Motors’ in Indian stock exchanges), which has been established by Tata as an ambitious new channel for investigating the latest automotive inventions and processes. It will also be used to form relationships with the leading disrupters of the car world – some of them truly tiny concerns – without disturbing Tata’s core business of making cars in large numbers for its Indian customers.

To underscore its special significance, the Racemo’s Geneva debut took two dramatically different forms. The three-dimensional launch was the rakish little sports car you see here, planned for a production run of around 250. At the same moment, the Racemo was also revealed in a virtual domain online, as a new competitor in Microsoft’s Forza Horizon 3 game for the Xbox, downloadable (and customisable) via a special website. On top of everything, it was proposed as India’s first connected car, capable of transferring data as needed, using analytics to aid driver decisions and able to ‘talk’ to cars around it.

A new word – ‘phygital’ – has been coined for projects like this, and the Racemo’s twin instigators, Tata head of advanced and product engineering Tim Leverton and head of design Pratap Bose, believe it’s the beginning of something very big. Autocar met the pair a couple of weeks ago at Tata’s European design and engineering HQ on the outskirts of Coventry, a stone’s throw from Jaguar’s former Browns Lane HQ.

“There are two ways of owning this car,” explains Leverton. “You can physically buy one, which isn’t a course open to very many, or you can experience it virtually, which is an important way of doing things in a country as large as India, with only one race track and 600 million smartphone users. So with Racemo, we set out to design not just a car, but to design a customer experience. And the results have been pretty awesome.”

Bose, who had the original idea for the Racemo, was in Switzerland when the game went live as the fullsized model was revealed. “By the following morning, we were already seeing hundreds of individually customised versions of the car online,” he says. “It was amazing. And by the following weekend, there had been 280,000 downloads of the promotional video and the Xbox game. We knew we were onto something really big.”

Bose says the Racemo was intended especially to make a connection between Tata and Indian young people, who will be tomorrow’s customers. “Kids start making decisions about brands and products around the age of 12,” he says. “We felt we were previously missing the 12 to 20 age group completely. But now, with the virtual concept, we’re talking directly to this most important group.”

Even without its other duties, the Racemo is a beguiling little car, especially at the sub-£30,000 price some have estimated for it. It uses low-volume, low-investment build techniques, which means it – and the Tamo products that will follow – can be produced quickly, in short runs, as a way of seeing and assessing opportunities. Tata decided back in 2012 to base its core product range mostly on two highly flexible platforms. This is its way of experimenting without disturbing the main business.

Leverton says we’ll see two more Tamo products in the cycle plan before 2020. Along the way, Tamo’s management will establish what Leverton calls “an innovation hub” at each of its technical centres around the world – in the UK, the US, India and Italy – comprising a handful of senior people able to meet small innovators and set up projects and agreements, without necessarily having to involve head office. This, Leverton hopes, will give Tata an advantage in the never-ending technology race.

Higher purpose aside, the Racemo is a beguiling little car, about the same length as an original BMW Mini at 3835mm overall, with a radically shaped body that directs air through as well as around its composite plastic panels. Overall weight is targeted at 800kg, although it’s not clear whether this will be achieved. The Racemo’s shape and graphics were devised at Tata’s Turin design centre, with the Lotus Elise and Alfa Romeo 4C as influences, although there are no similarities. The Racemo’s success is that it looks more practical than an Elise and less bulky than a 4C – and, to most eyes, very suitable for sales in Europe, although there are no plans for this.

Leverton is passionate about the fact that there are no longer big differences between the needs of customers in mature and emerging markets, as was once assumed. “My mantra is global standards,” he says. “If you try to palm the Indian buyer off with something less, you’ve had it – and there’s no second chance.”

Even so, Tata’s expertise at keeping things simple is evident in the Racemo (the lower dashboard and centre console are in body colour, for instance). But the overall effect is surprisingly exotic, helped by the door design, which works very sweetly.

The engine is a transversely mounted 1.2-litre turbocharged triple producing 188bhp and 155lb ft, and driving the rear wheels through a six-speed paddle-shift gearbox. One sign of Tamo’s eye for reduced complication is the fact that you must always use the paddles to change gears. There’s no auto mode, says Leverton, but he expects owners to see this as a virtue. The tyres are differently sized front to rear, as befits a car with a 60% rearward weight distribution, and the brakes are Brembo discs.

Within the Racemo promotional material, there’s a simple line that stands for the whole project: “Have a supercar without the cost,” it says. This is meant to appeal especially to canny Indians, reputed to have a keen eye for keeping outlay down. But we can’t help thinking Tata, Leverton and Bose may have underestimated the appeal of the same idea to enthusiasts in the UK and plenty of other places besides. A little car intended for a modest build of 250 units – and to appear on the streets from early next year – may be in danger of causing a stampede.

Jeep is all set to roll out its first 'Made in India' model, the Compass SUV, tomorrow from Fiat’s Ranjangaon plant in Maharashtra. This facility will be the mother plant for all right-hand-drive versions of the Compass SUV to be sold in India and in many international markets like Japan and the UK to name a few. Fiat and Jeep are betting big on this model and have invested around US$ 280 million for the production of the Compass. Interestingly, around 70 percent of the SUV, including the engines, are manufactured locally. Panel stamping isn’t done in-house yet, but the doors are laser-welded – a first in India.

The Compass will be available globally in as many as 17 engine, gearbox and drivetrain configurations and some of them will be manufactured in India for the international markets. Built on the same platform as the Renegade (small, wide 4x4), the Compass, however, features a longer wheelbase for greater space on the inside and a mildly altered suspension system.

The Compass will be sold in India with two engine options. First up, there is a 2.0-litre MultiJet diesel good for 170hp and 350Nm of torque. This engine will be available in both 4x2 and 4x4 configurations. The sole gearbox on offer with this engine will be a six-speed manual unit. There will be no automatic transmission on offer, at least initially. However, there is a chance of a nine-speed automatic gearbox at a later stage. The second engine on offer is the 1.4-litre MultiAir petrol. This 1.4-litre motor churns out around 160hp and, like the diesel variant, will be available with 4x2 and 4x4 option. Transmission choices include a six-speed manual and a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic.

Higher variants of the Compass will come with a 7.0-inch Uconnect infotainment system; this system will come with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Sources tell us that Jeep has not compromised in the interior quality of the Compass sold in India and the models will have exactly the same levels of fit and finish as the ones that will be exported. Jeep will offer the Compass with as many as six airbags.

There will be additional safety features on offer like a reverse camera with sensors, along with the usual safety equipment like ABS, ESP, electronic roll-over mitigation and hill-start assist. The biggest advantage of heavy localisation, however, is that Jeep can offer a competitive price. The Compass is expected to be priced between Rs 18 lakh and Rs 25 lakh when it hits showrooms in the coming months.

Jeep is all set to roll out its first 'Made in India' model, the Compass SUV, tomorrow from Fiat’s Ranjangaon plant in Maharashtra. This facility will be the mother plant for all right-hand-drive versions of the Compass SUV to be sold in India and in many international markets like Japan and the UK to name a few. Fiat and Jeep are betting big on this model and have invested around US$ 280 million for the production of the Compass. Interestingly, around 70 percent of the SUV, including the engines, are manufactured locally. Panel stamping isn’t done in-house yet, but the doors are laser-welded – a first in India.

The Compass will be available globally in as many as 17 engine, gearbox and drivetrain configurations and some of them will be manufactured in India for the international markets. Built on the same platform as the Renegade (small, wide 4x4), the Compass, however, features a longer wheelbase for greater space on the inside and a mildly altered suspension system.

The Compass will be sold in India with two engine options. First up, there is a 2.0-litre MultiJet diesel good for 170hp and 350Nm of torque. This engine will be available in both 4x2 and 4x4 configurations. The sole gearbox on offer with this engine will be a six-speed manual unit. There will be no automatic transmission on offer, at least initially. However, there is a chance of a nine-speed automatic gearbox at a later stage. The second engine on offer is the 1.4-litre MultiAir petrol. This 1.4-litre motor churns out around 160hp and, like the diesel variant, will be available with 4x2 and 4x4 option. Transmission choices include a six-speed manual and a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic.

Higher variants of the Compass will come with a 7.0-inch Uconnect infotainment system; this system will come with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Sources tell us that Jeep has not compromised in the interior quality of the Compass sold in India and the models will have exactly the same levels of fit and finish as the ones that will be exported. Jeep will offer the Compass with as many as six airbags.

There will be additional safety features on offer like a reverse camera with sensors, along with the usual safety equipment like ABS, ESP, electronic roll-over mitigation and hill-start assist. The biggest advantage of heavy localisation, however, is that Jeep can offer a competitive price. The Compass is expected to be priced between Rs 18 lakh and Rs 25 lakh when it hits showrooms in the coming months.

Suzuki Motor, the Japanese parent of India's largest passenger vehicles maker Maruti Suzuki India Ltd (MSIL), is gearing up to produce affordable electric vehicles for the Indian market.

The ball was set in motion by starting work on a Rs 1,151 crore lithium ion battery-manufacturing unit in the Suzuki Motor Gujarat Suppliers Park in Hansalpur.

This apart, the company also announced plans to set up a third plant in Gujarat at Rs 3,800 crore, which would take the net investment in Hansalpur to Rs 13,400 crore (excluding the Rs 1,151 crore lithium ion battery plant, which is being set up as a joint venture).

The lithium ion battery project is a joint venture of SMC, Denso Corporation, and Toshiba Corporation, and in it Suzuki will hold 50 per cent, Toshiba 40 per cent, and Denso 10 per cent.

The venture is expected to be operational in 2020. Batteries will be mounted on hybrid vehicles manufactured in India and then the products will be exported.

The move is significant because this is the first time a major original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is investing in making lithium ion batteries, which are critical in making electric and hybrid vehicles.

This would pave the way for making affordable electric powertrain by reducing the battery cost.

Lithium batteries are largely imported, and Maruti itself imports it for its Ciaz hybrid.

Suzuki Motor Gujarat (SMG), the wholly-owned subsidiary of SMC, is investing around $600 million (Rs 3,800 crore) to build its third plant in Gujarat. It will be able to produce 250,000 units a year.

SMG has commissioned its first plant (capacity 250,000 units a year), which became operational in February and currently makes the Baleno. The construction of the second plant (capacity 250,000 units a year) and a 500,000-unit per annum powertrain manufacturing facility has started.

Expected to be commissioned by 2019, with the completion of the second plant, Suzuki’s production capacity in India (Haryana and Gujarat) will be 2 million units, supporting MSIL’s objective of reaching annual sales of 2 million in 2020.

As the third plant comes on stream, SMG's capacity in Gujarat will be 750,000 units a year and the overall India capacity will touch 2.25 million units a year.

In the long run, SMG will have an installed capacity of 1.5 million units in Gujarat. With the third plant, it will employ 10,000 people (including suppliers).